Allentown Awaits Another Verse in Ballad of Renewal

When Mack Trucks closed its plant, when a fight broke out in the unemployment line, when Billy Joel wrote a song about the slow death of industrial America and called it “Allentown,” those were bad times.

Today, no, these are definitely not bad times. And don’t for a minute think folks here don’t appreciate the difference.

What many could use, though--what this town could use--is a few more good years, a few more changes out of Washington. The really good days--the kind seen an hour and a half east in New York City--are wonderfully close. They’re just the other side of a decent raise, maybe, or some Social Security reform, or a new employer that pays like Mack did, or a few more cops to break up drug dealing in plain sight on Sixth Street.

As voters here consider who should be the next president of the United States, they would like the candidates to know some of their concerns. Fortunately for them, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush may be interested to hear.

Four months before the presidential election, the two candidates have already divvied up most of the states--California and Hawaii will likely go to Democrat Gore, for example, and Alaska and Texas to Republican Bush. The race will be won or lost in eight or nine swing states--the most crucial of which may well be this one.

With 23 electoral votes--the most of any battleground state--the Keystone State may prove just that for the man who would be president. And if this town of 105,000 residents tends to be more conservative than Philadelphia, where Bush was nominated Thursday at the Republican National Convention, it’s also more liberal than, say, the town of State College. It contains a representative mix of voters--and a telling wish list for the next president.

Joyce Hein, wheeling her service cart down the hallway at the Allentown Hilton, says she’s glad to have her job, but she’s 69 now, and after 14 years cleaning rooms she still earns $7.25 an hour. She’s not sure how long she can keep this up, but with $85 in the bank, she won’t be retiring any time soon.

Up Hamilton Street, at the hot dog stand Gail Harrison opened to get her out of her stifling office job after her 8-year-old daughter was killed by a car, it’s 2:45 p.m. and already time to close down. She loves working this corner but doesn’t feel safe among the boarded-up storefronts come nightfall.

Across town at American Legion Post 29, Sylvia Seibert, 52, says she is thankful Social Security covers most of her daughter’s medical bills because the 29-year-old woman is mentally retarded, epileptic and legally blind. But Seibert, who tends the well-worn bar, cannot afford insurance for herself.

In 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had it right: It was the economy, voters here and across the country agreed.

Today, as many here see it, there is no such unifying dilemma. The important questions, the deepest worries are numerous and nuanced, and many voters hope Washington will attend to their less-dramatic but equally vexing problems.

“You know, the biggest things, they’re doing OK--the economy, no war, that kind of stuff,” says 39-year-old construction foreman Richard Washington. “While things are going good, we need some of the little stuff taken care of--pills for older people, student loans, stuff like that. That’s the hard part, I think.”

Second-Oldest U.S. Population

Pennsylvania, like many states, can be somewhat coarsely divided in terms of politics: The urban areas, notably Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, lean left, the suburbs and rural areas break right.

As a crucible of the Industrial Revolution, however, and with the second-oldest population of any state after Florida, Pennsylvania is home to voters who might be drawn to Bush and Gore. Here, the Republican Party has long been more economically liberal than in most places, and the Democratic Party more conservative on social issues.

The state’s political topography, always a bit difficult to read, is shifting. To study the lay of this land there is perhaps no better place than Allentown.

Anchored like a blast furnace in the west end of the Lehigh Valley, this is like dozens of other mid-size towns across America. It lies just far enough from the cities--New York to the east, Philadelphia 45 minutes south--to escape most of their crime problems. But it also enjoys only the slightest ripple from their economies. It is vibrant enough to boast a minor league baseball team but not one affiliated with a major league club.

The town is home to a replica of the Liberty Bell because that symbol of freedom was hidden for a time beneath the floorboards at Zion’s Church during the Revolutionary War. The real bell, of course, can be found in Philadelphia.

Allentown should not, perhaps, be so famous. But almost overnight, in 1982, Billy Joel defined this place, to the chagrin of many.

Well, we’re living here in Allentown

And they’re closing all the factories down . . .

It was a few miles up the valley in Bethlehem where they were closing the factory down, Bethlehem Steel. Allentown wouldn’t lose its biggest plant, Mack Trucks, for several more years. But factual inconsistencies aside, it was, as Joel sang, “getting very hard to stay.”

Eighteen years later, much has changed. Lucent Technologies opened another plant this spring, a sprawling optoelectronics center. High-tech start-ups occupy many of the recently rusting industrial parks. The baseball team, the Allentown Ambassadors, is planning a new ballpark, complete with pricey sky boxes.

There is much, though, that hasn’t changed, at least not enough.

That’s what the folks in the $4 Ambassadors seats say, as well as those in $7 seats. That’s what they say at the bus stops on Hamilton Street. That’s what they say at Harrison’s hot dog stand, where she last raised prices five years ago, by a nickel, “and people had a fit.”

Harrison would like someone to occupy the empty DNC Bank building behind her and the empty county building across the street. She’d like a few more police officers out here, maybe. But what she really wants from her next president is a good example.

“Out here, I see a down slide in our society,” she says. “People being rude, thoughtless, throwing garbage in the street, mothers cursing at their kids. . . . It didn’t happen overnight. But I think morality comes from the top. We need a president who’s more morally adjusted, shall we say, than Clinton.”

Conrad Powell, 56, who works for a title company, agrees, orders another hot dog and adds another item of concern: tort reform. “Let’s have a little bit of reason in these giant jury awards,” he says.

Both are leaning toward Bush, who has a slight lead in the state, according to most polls. Both could perhaps be persuaded otherwise.

Splitting Votes Is Not Unusual

Pennsylvanians have long shown a willingness to split their votes, twice voting for Clinton but also electing Republican Gov. Thomas J. Ridge, two Republican senators and a Republican majority in the state Legislature during the 1990s.

Here in Allentown, Democrats still outnumber Republicans 3 to 2. But you wouldn’t know that from recent voting trends.

As the factories have faded, so have the unions--and in turn their political clout. At the same time, independent-minded thirtysomethings have flowed in with the nascent technology industry.

“Allentown has changed to the point where it’s a political tossup,” says Frank Colon, a political scientist at nearby Lehigh University.

“Nothing’s changed for me,” says Hein, the housekeeper who works part-time cleaning the eighth floor at the Hilton. “It’s about money. I need more money from my job.”

A great-grandmother, Hein receives $600 a month from Social Security and earns about $400 a month at the hotel. She pays $650 a month in rent.

“I don’t know, Bush seems like he’s for the rich, like Texans and stuff,” says Hein, who paid no attention to the Republican convention but plans to follow the Democratic gathering in Los Angeles next week. “Al Gore, he really does want to help people.”

Barbara Morsching, a 44-year-old co-worker with a grown daughter, agrees. “Gore’s the one,” she says, flashing an exuberant thumbs-up.

Maybe Time for a Change

Eva Sosa, 41, another co-worker, thinks it might be time for a change. Sosa, who came to the States 20 years ago from Puerto Rico, and her husband, a computer drafter, have three teenage children. They’re sending the oldest to nearby Millersville University in the fall.

The Sosa family is doing all right, thanks in no small part to Clinton and Gore, Eva says. “But I don’t know, I think it’s just time for someone brand new.”

Back at the American Legion hall, Seibert is feeding some of her favorite veterans homemade meatballs and bologna roll-ups, and everyone is talking politics--a topic usually banned here, along with religion.

“I’m in a Catch-22 situation,” Seibert says. “I work, but I don’t make enough to buy insurance and make too much to be covered by the state.”

“I have one little thorn, and that’s foreign aid,” chimes in 61-year-old Jim Hirst.

“Well, Jim, you’re my brother, but you don’t see the big picture,” says Forrest “Buster” Hirst, 74. “Those people aren’t getting fed.”

“We got people right here in Allentown aren’t getting fed,” Jim Hirst responds.

And so it goes, back and forth and back and forth, kind of like the state when it comes to politics.

And then the conversation turns to the really hard times.

Pennsylvania has the second-largest number of veterans after California. Everyone in the room is old enough to remember how each time another smokestack stopped belching, the sky became bluer but the workers came home with pink slips. And everybody in the room lost a loved one to war--the Hirsts a brother, killed in the Au Shau Valley of Vietnam in 1965; Seibert her fiance, killed two years later.

There is a long pause in the somber conversation. Seibert refills a few mugs of Yuengling, brewed at the country’s oldest brewery, just west in Pottsville. Buster Hirst takes a sip and then breaks the silence.

“Listen,” he says quietly. “Things can always get better. . . . The next president will have plenty to do. . . . But in my day, I don’t think I’ve seen it so good.”

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Pennsylvania is one of a few key swing states that may help decide who is elected president in November. This is the first story in an occasional series on voters in and around Allentown.

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Allentown

Population: 105,000

Registered voters:

Republican: 19,907

Democrat: 30,063

Other: 6,586

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Lehigh County (includes Allentown)

Unemployment: 3.5% in May 2000

Median household income: $33,049